


0

by allp_wips



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-06-26 18:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19773568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allp_wips/pseuds/allp_wips
Summary: In a world where everyone's wrist has a number which ticks down the years to when they meet their soulmate, Alex's wrist has always shown a negative number.





	0

_-25_

She's born with a _25_ on her wrist. At least, that's what everyone thinks for the first year. Eliza Danvers thinks that the dash of darker skin just before the number must just be some birthmark.

_-26_

The _26_ on her wrist isn't actually discovered until quite late into Alex's first birthday, because her parents are so busy running around trying to organize her birthday party and corral all their relatives, while also quieting their squalling child.

It's when they're putting her down to bed that night, after every last guest has finally been shown the door, that Eliza catches the number on Alex's wrist, and calls Jeremiah over to see.

_-37_

Alex Danvers is 12 years old when she first finds out what soulmates really are, and that the marker on her wrist is supposed to count down to the time when she meets hers. 

It's odd that she finds this out from a classmate, Alex thinks at that time. Her parents have never been ones to shy away from teaching her new information. After all, Alex had been given the birds and the bees talk when she was barely ten years old, complete with an illustrated slideshow, simply because she had been curious on the matter.

But, when it comes to soulmates, her parents are curiously tight-lipped. They've always encouraged Alex to hide the numbers on her wrist with bracelets, something which didn't really raise eyebrows at school, because it had become a bit of a teen fad to do that. They've only ever hinted at what the numbers on her wrist could mean, which is why Alex has never thought much about them, or why they increase each year on her birthday.

_-38_

On the night before Alex's 13th birthday, Jeremiah Danvers takes her camping.

"I know you don't like the big family parties your mom throws," he says, flashing her one of his brief smiles, as he takes the exit from the highway towards the camping grounds. "I figured this would be a bit of a distraction before you have to face all that."

Alex twirls the ever-present bracelet on her wrist, that hides the numbers. It's become a bit of a habit of hers, when she's bored or nervous.

"It's not too bad," she says. "I just don't like the way they all keep staring at my wrist."

There are people she knows who have no numbers on their wrist, and seem content with that. They're perfectly happy without romantic love. Alex doesn't know anyone else with negative numbers, though, and it's getting harder and harder to hide the existence of hers from curious relatives and friends.

"I'm sorry." Jeremiah sighs. "If we could've kept them from finding out-"

He trails off, with another sigh.

"I don't get it," Alex says, with a frown. "What's the big deal? Why do I have to marry some guy just because a number on my wrist says that? Gross."

Alex's dad looks a little startled at that, before he breaks into a shaky laugh.

"I dunno, kiddo. Maybe you'll change your mind on that, when you're older."

Alex makes a face, thinking it unlikely, and turns the subject to their plans for the night ahead.

That night they're toasting s'mores and chatting idly, when Alex realizes in the middle of fiddling with her bracelet, that the number on her wrist has gone up by one.

"It must be past midnight," she says.

Jeremiah understands immediately, and a cloud falls over his face.

"You're right, Alex," he says, getting down from the stone he'd been sitting on, and squatting beside her, so that they're almost at eye level. "Soulmates aren't everything they're cracked up to be. Don't think that's the only way to be happy."

There's something curiously intense about the way he says it, but Alex still doesn't get it, not really. That fact that she has an out from having to fall in love some boy the universe had inexplicably chosen for her... that feels like a relief, not a curse, even though she'd never admit that to her friends. 

_-39_

A few weeks before the number on Alex's wrist goes up again, Kara crash-lands on Earth. Suddenly, there is an unexpected addition to the Danvers family.

Kara is unexpected and annoying and around _all the time_ , which takes a lot of getting used to. She's also deeply in need of help and support, and some innate part of Alex responds to that, even when she doesn't want to. It takes a real life murder mystery to really get them to start bonding, though.

By the time the number on her wrist goes up one again, Alex has gained something a lot better than a soulmate: a sister.

_-40_

A week after the number on Alex's wrist goes up again, Jeremiah disappears. Her mother tells her it was an accident at his work, but Alex sees the anxious circles under her eyes, and the ever-present grief, and the way she won't meet Kara's eyes for a while, and she knows there's more to the story. 

_-43_

Alex is already in college by the time she realizes that maybe her aversion to soulmates came not from the soulmate part, but from the fact she had assumed it was a man. 

Suddenly, the vague pictures she's had in her head of marrying someone and having a family, become a lot more clear. Suddenly, the words of comfort her father had told her all those years ago, make a lot more sense. Suddenly, far from being a source of comfort, the fact that the numbers on her wrist are an anomaly becomes terrifying.

It's just another thing, on top of the loss of her father, taking care of Kara, and keeping afloat of her studies, and Alex sinks. 

_-48_

She sinks right down, without ever making a sound, until she wakes up one day in a holding cell, with a wicked hangover in her head, and a stranger watching her through the bars.

_-49_

Working for Hank Henshaw changes her life. Alex spends a full half of her 24th year of life at the DEO, putting in 12 hours a day in the training rooms. She forgets about soulmates, and negative numbers, and throws herself into her work, knowing that _this_ is something she can succeed and find purpose in. After her rigorous physical training, she then has to spend months in the forensic lab, learning to work with and document alien DNA, before Hank decides that she is fit to go out into the field. 

His way of letting her know is by entering the lab and throwing a bulletproof vest at her.

Alex puts it on without comment. It fits perfectly, and she has to wonder when they even took her measurements.

“Rogue Branx tearing up the Sharks’ home stadium.” Hank begins without preamble. “You’ll be part of the backup team. Your team is waiting outside the west door.”

“Civilians involved?” Alex asks, already moving out the door.

“Negative.” Hank replies, “But a game is scheduled for tonight and the setup crew is already agitating to be let on to the field, come hell or highwater or aliens. Oh and ...Agent Danvers?”

Alex pauses with her hand on the door handle, and looks back at Hank.

“Ready to save the world?” he asks, with what might possibly have been a half-smile, if Alex had held it up to a microscope.

Alex nods and continues towards the west wing.

After all, Kara has always been worth the whole world to her.

_-51_

Two years later, Kara reveals herself to the world as Supergirl, and Alex's life - once again - changes irrevocably. 

For one thing, she has to come with the fact that Kara is inescapably alien: the same thing Alex has been trained to fight and destroy. It had been one thing to know that when Kara was in hiding; it's something else to actually accept it when she's out in the field fighting alongside Alex. Suddenly, the line between human and alien is a lot more blurred.

And, just when she's struggling to adjust to that point of view, Alex is kidnapped by Astra, someone who _does_ confirm every worst assumption she's ever made about aliens. 

_-52_

The night Alex kills Astra, the numbers on her wrist go up once more. 

She doesn't even realize it's her birthday, until she gets home that night, and sees the voice message from her mother on the phone. Kara doesn't come by with cake until the next evening, acting so determinedly cheerful that Alex knows something is wrong.

Astra is cold and ruthless, with a calculating efficiency that could have murdered thousands and enslaved millions, if Alex had let her.

That's what Alex tells herself, because that's easier than remembering the terror in Astra's eyes when she had been subjected to kryptonite, the tenderness in them whenever she looked at Kara, and the conflicted maelstrom in them when Alex had pleaded with her to give up her cause.

Astra, cold and heartless Astra, deserved to die on that cold rooftop. There had been no other way. There really hadn't.

_-53_

When the pod crashes down to Earth after they've defeated Non and his twisted version of Myriad, for some reason there's a frantic hope blooming in Alex's chest. It can't be. Astra had died, had bled out before her very eyes. There had been no hope for her, no hope at all in the world.

But, still, a foolish part of Alex hopes.

Then Kara drags in a comatose man into the DEO, claiming he was the one in the pod, and that's how Mon-El disappoints Alex long before he starts disappointing everyone else.

_-54_

Somehow, Kara falls in love with Mon-El. At least, he manages to make her believe that she's in love with him, strongly enough for Kara to accept battle with Rhea of Daxam over it. 

When the Daxamites are defeated, and Mon-El has to leave, Alex can see that his departure destroys something inside Kara. She suspects that it's not even about him, really. Mon-El is just the tipping point, of something that's been building inside Kara for a long time, since the death of Krypton, her parents, Kenny Li, Cat's abrupt leave...

...and Astra.

_-55_

Kara doesn't get better.

Oh, she claims she does, and maybe she _does_ seem better, to everyone except the sister who's known her all her life. Alex notices that there's something irrevocably different about her, now. Kara wears her losses, and her anger, and her fear, a little closer to her sleeve. She slips up a little more. 

That year, Kara has to save the multiverse again, except this time Alex gets dragged along with her. 

**Pros:** She gets to meet Sara Lance

**Cons:** She has to meet a version of her sister that she wishes had never existed.

But, the excursion gives Alex an idea.

"You know about the multiverse," she asks Sara, desperation in her voice. "There must be _one_ world, at least just one, where Krypton survives."

Sara shakes her head. There's something like pity hidden somewhere deep in her eyes.

"Nope," she says. "Fifty two worlds, and Krypton dies in every single one."

Alex wants to scream, and maybe some of her desperation shows in her face, because Sara's next words are gentler.

"Take it from me, Danvers, destiny has a strange way of playing tricks. Some things are meant to be, in any universe, and I know a thing or two about wanting to change something that can't be changed."

_-56_

Alex doesn't know why Sara ends up changing her mind. Maybe it's because Sara, as she has noticed, has a habit of granting everyone else second chances, even if she'll never allow herself such luxuries.

What she knows is that, as Kara slips further into her depression and isolation, and Alex despairs of being able to save her, Sara shows up in her apartment one day, with a navigation device in her hand. 

"This'll guide you to the jumpship I've left in the desert," she says. "It'll take you to whatever time period in your universe that you want to go to. You have one week to do what you've got to do, before I have to explain that jumpship's disappearance from the Waverider to the Time Bureau."

Alex grasps it like a starving man grasping at a container of water.

"You won't regret this," she vows.

"Don't thank me," Sara says. "Travelling through time is a lot messier than you think, Alex."

Alex swallows. "I have to try."

"Bringing him back won't heal her, you know." Sara's voice isn't judgemental, just matter-of-fact.

"I know," Alex says. "Bringing Astra back won't, either, or her parents. I have to go further back than that."

She looks up and meets Sara's eyes.

"You've got a one in a million chance of pulling _that_ off," Sara says.

"No," Alex says. 

She smiles. Now that she's on the cusp of attempting something momentous, many hitherto incomprehensible things are clicking in her mind. The numbers on her wrist. The way Astra had looked at her. All the lies Alex had told herself, to rid her guilt over that one killing from her mind.

"I think I can find someone who'll help me even the odds," she says.

Destiny does, indeed, have a strange way of playing tricks on people.

Some minutes later, after saying her goodbyes to Sara and writing a note for Kara, Alex finds the ship hidden in the desert, and travels back 56 years in time.

**_0_ **

Fifty-six Earth years into the past, in a tall skyscraper on Krytpon, Astra is awakened by the loud beeping of the intruder alarm. Without opening her eyes, she lobs a pillow straight at the klaxon beeping out its shrill warning.

It doesn't stop. Astra grunts.

_"Told you to fix that damn thing about a hundred times, Non,"_ she murmurs, at the fiance who's not even in her bed - an occurence that has been more and more common these days, as their deployments separate them from each other more and more.

Up this high, no one can actually break in to their shared quarters, but the high winds often tend to set off the motion sensors around the place. That's obviously what has happened again. It's nothing more.

It can't be anything else, but the cautious part of Astra that has been honed during her time in the Fleet, decides to check, just in case.

Blearily, she stumbles her way out of bed. It's too early, and she'd stayed up too long last night, writing her proposal to the High Council, submitting her concerns about Krypton's deteriorating core and what they should be doing to stave off disaster. Rao knows that those blowhards definitely won't be up this early to review it.

She does a cursory visual check of her quarters, before making her way up to the roof. No standard flyer could have landed there without being smashed against the parapets by the high winds. And indeed, no one is there.

Astra sucks in a breath, and is about to make her way back down, when a movement catches her peripheral vision. She turns back, just in time to see a ship melt into existence out of thin air. It's like no other flyer or spaceship she's even seen. Before Astra can even begin to place its origin, a figure steps out of it, dressed in all black.

"I am Alex Danvers," the stranger says, in formal Kandorian Kryptonese that sounds as if they'd studied it out of a book. "I know you do not know me, Astra, but you and I are going to save Krypton."

\---


End file.
